Ex-special forces colonel, who is sounding alarm on Russia, has risen swiftly to role of armed forces minister
A former special forces colonel, government minister Al Carns was this week on manouevres warning that the UK needs to be preparing for war with Russia.
“The shadow of war is knocking on Europe’s door once more. That’s the reality. We’ve got to be prepared to deter it,” he said, in comments that go beyond previous warnings by his boss, the defence secretary, John Healey.
Exclusive: As Labour ministers prepare long awaited strategy, campaigners accuse them of sidelining experts
Leading organisations have criticised the development of the government’s flagship violence against women and girls strategy, calling the process chaotic, haphazard and “worse than under the Tories”.
Ministers are gearing up for a policy announcement blitz before the publication of the long-awaited plan next week.
Conservative policies that pitted drivers against cyclists risked making the roads less safe by inflaming tensions, a minister has said, promising that the era of transport culture wars is over.
Lilian Greenwood, whose Department for Transport (DfT) role includes road safety and active travel, said seeking to divide road users into categories was pointless given most people used different transport methods at different times.
Mark Rowley says capital is a safe city, and claims of no-go areas are ‘completely false’
Members of the House of Lords have proposed “totally unnecessary” and “very cruel” amendments to the assisted dying bill in a bid to scupper it, Kim Leadbeater, the MP leading the campaign for the legislation, has said. Kiran Stacey has the story.
I have beefed up the post at 9.08am to include the direct quote from Wes Streeting about not being able to guarantee patient safety in the NHS if the strike by resident doctors in England goes ahead. You may need to refresh the page to get the update to appear.
Announcement draws anger from Labour MP over refusal to remove tonnes of rubbish dumped near school in Wigan
The Environment Agency is to spend millions of pounds to clear an enormous illegal rubbish dump in Oxfordshire, saying the waste is at risk of catching fire.
But the decision announced on Thursday to clear up the thousands of tonnes of waste illegally dumped outside Kidlington has drawn an angry response from a Labour MP in Greater Manchester whose constituents have been living alongside 25,000 tonnes of toxic rubbish for nearly a year.
The courts are a clumsy means to negotiate social relationships. Let organisations make up their own minds about inclusion
Towards the end of her life, I was a friend of the writer Jan Morris. I had known her for many years and, much to my regret, had declined an offer to do her “tell all” interview when she transitioned. Jan presented herself as a woman and had undergone an operation. To me she was simply a remarkable woman. She touched, sometimes humorously, on embarrassing incidents in her life. But it never occurred to me that a legal ruling might hover over our restaurant table and block her from going to the ladies.
Last April, the supreme court issued a ruling confirming that the word “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex, not a person’s legal gender. This has a wide-reaching impact on how equality law is applied in practice, particularly in providing sex-based rights such as single-sex spaces. Six months later, a draft code on the ruling’s implementation was sent bythe Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to the equalities minister, Bridget Phillipson. She has been sitting on it ever since, pleading for more time.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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Sir Keir Starmer promised to bring meaningful reform to the House of Lords. He is failing to introduce it
In opposition, Sir Keir Starmer called the unelected House of Lords “indefensible”. This week, barely 18 months into his prime ministership, Sir Keir took the total of unelected peers he has appointed since July 2024 to 96. Remarkably, Wednesday’s 34 new life peerages, mainly Labour supporters, take his appointment total above those of each of his four most recent Conservative predecessors. You must go back to David Cameron to find a prime minister who did more to stuff the Lords than Sir Keir.
At the last election, Labour presented itself to the voters as a party of Lords reform. The party manifesto promised to remove the remaining hereditary peers, to reform the appointments process, to impose a peers’ retirement age, and to consult on proposals for replacing the Lords with an alternative second chamber. The House of Lords, the manifesto flatly declared, was “too big”.
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Labour’s £500m national youth strategy has some positives, but real change must start by tackling the root causes of unhappiness
Bonnie Blue, the porn actor who recently made headlines for her antics in Bali – which you probably shouldn’t Google – has come out in support of Nigel Farage.
And in not unconnected news, “rage baiting” – saying deliberately annoying things to get attention – is the Oxford University Press’s word of the year. Bonnie’s most effective way of advertising her X-rated content to the masses now is by generating enough controversy to get her publicly talked about, and she’s very good at making just enough noise (this time in the Spectator, of all places) to drum up a bit of traffic.
You’d think MPs would be lining up to decry the US president’s support for far-right nationalists. Instead, only backbenchers and a few junior ministers bothered to turn up
’Twas the fortnight before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Apart from a few exceptions. The Labour backbencher Matt Western had managed to secure an urgent question on President Trump’s new national security strategy and the Commons itself was remarkable for its absences. A roll-call of dishonour.
Take Nigel Farage. You would have thought he would have had a lot to say on the subject. After all, when Barack Obama had intervened in the Brexit referendum campaign to say the UK would be at the back of the queue for any trade deal with the US, Nige had been outraged. How dare the president try to interfere with the democratic processes of another sovereign country? So now that Donald Trump was threatening to do much the same thing in countries all across Europe, surely this was the time for Nige to make a stand. This was surely a point of principle for him. Were he to have any.
The government has vowed that there will be no more concessions on the employment rights bill and that it will force the Lords to vote on it again next week, after Conservative and cross-bench peers blocked it on Wednesday night.
Ministers and trade unions expressed fury that the bill was voted down again in the House of Lords by peers protesting against the lifting of the compensation cap for unfair dismissal, calling it “cynical wrecking tactics that risk a constitutional crisis”.
It’s a scandal laid bare. A stark new report highlights the price paid in Britain’s former industrial heartlands for this silent piece of ministerial vandalism
The Welsh valleys have some of the highest numbers of people claiming incapacity benefits in the whole of Britain. In Abertillery, Maesteg and Merthyr Tydfil, getting on for a quarter of the working-age population is not employed – in large part due to long-term ill-health. If the government was serious about reducing the growing welfare bill, it would be starting here and in the other parts of the country blighted by deindustrialisation and poverty. It would identify the parts of the country most in need – Wales, Scotland and large swaths of northern England – and love-bomb them.
Yet instead of devoting more money to regional economic development, ministers are doing the opposite. In one of its less-publicised policy moves, Labour has quietly gutted the fund designed to create jobs, a scheme inherited from the Conservatives. The silent demolition job on regional policy is laid bare in a new report by Steve Fothergill, national director of the Industrial Communities Alliance, an umbrella group for the local authorities worst affected by the hollowing out of Britain’s industrial base and the closure of the coalfields.
Government lost Lords vote on employment rights bill by 24 votes, just hours after the creation of 25 new Labour peers
Good morning. Yesterday Keir Starmer announced the creation of 25 Labour new peers. About an hour or so later, the government lost an important vote on the employment rights bill – by 24 votes.
The defeat was unexpected, because the government because already announced a significant U-turn on the bill, as part a compromise deal negotiated with business and unions intended to ensure the legislation clears the Lords quickly. What is going to happen next is not yet clear.
Flagship workers’ rights reforms face a further holdup as peers inflicted a defeat over a late change linked to the government concession on unfair dismissal that has been branded “a job destroyer”.
The latest setback means a continuation of the parliamentary tussle over the employmentrightsbill known as “ping-pong”, when legislation is batted between the Commons and Lords until agreement is reached.
Continuing to vote down the employment rights bill – a clear manifesto commitment – is undemocratic. This bill has been debated and scrutinised for months. Tory Peers are actively defying the will of the British public and their own supporters who overwhelmingly support measures in this bill.
The behaviour of the House of Lords can no longer be seen as constructive scrutiny and increasingly looks like cynical wrecking tactics that risk a constitutional crisis if they continue.
Further delay is in nobody’s interests and only prolongs uncertainty, the bill must pass before Christmas including lifting the caps on compensation.
More than £3bn that could have been used for UK patients will go to big pharma for its branded products – money for care siphoned off for profit
Of Arthur Scargill it was said that he began each day with two newspapers. The miners’ leader read the Morning Star of course, but only after consulting the Financial Times. Why did a class warrior from Yorkshire accord such importance to the house journal of pinstriped Londoners? Before imbibing views, he told a journalist, he wanted “to get the facts”.
In that spirit, let us parse a deal just struck by the governments of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer. You may not have heard much about this agreement on medicine, but it is huge in both financial and political significance – and Downing Street could not be more proud.
A “world-beating deal,” boasts the science minister, Patrick Vallance. It “paves the way for the UK to become a global hub for life sciences,” claims the business secretary, Peter Kyle, with the government press release adding: “Tens of thousands of NHS patients will benefit.”
Exclusive: Alison McGovern makes target for end of this parliament, but figures show homelessness has jumped
The homelessness minister has pledged to end the use of bed and breakfasts as emergency housing, even as new figures show that the country’s homelessness problem has worsened since Labour came into government.
Alison McGovern said she would consider it a personal failing if people were still being placed in B&Bs by the end of this parliament as she launched the government’s three-year homelessness strategy.
Labour says appointments needed to balance upper house, and chooses former advisers to No 10 and the chancellor
Keir Starmer has appointed 25 Labour peers including a number of former senior government and party aides in an attempt to strengthen his hand in the House of Lords.
Matthew Doyle, a former No 10 director of communications, and Katie Martin, a former chief of staff to Rachel Reeves, will be among those appointed to the upper house in a move first reported by the Guardian.
Calls to modernise human rights law too often assume that hostile public opinion cannot be changed by argument from first principles
Arguments over the role of the European convention on human rights in asylum policy express a tension between the politics of an ever-changing world and the principle of immutable humanitarian values.
When Sir Keir Starmer observes that population flows in 2025 are different to conditions 75 years ago, when the ECHR was drafted, and that governments have a duty to adapt to the change, he is responding to political reality.
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Austerity hollowed out provision and hardened eligibility rules. A broken safety net now shuts out the poorest and drives rising homelessness
Moral logic is flipped on its head in England’s benefits system, which systematically excludes the poorest people from the only housing that was ever intended for them. Social homes were supposed to be for those who couldn’t afford private rents. However, a new report by Crisis shows that, because the stock of homes has been allowed to collapse, housing associations now ration supply by applying strict affordability tests. The homeless charity found that seven in 10 people with a history of rent arrears and no repayment plan would “sometimes” or “always” be excluded from housing registers. Perversely, England’s welfare system induces the very homelessness that it claims to alleviate.
Financial checks, along with rules requiring “local connections”, sharply narrow who can join the queue for social housing. For those who do, a further round of pre-tenancy checks means that about a third of housing associations refuse accommodation because applicants cannot afford even modest rents, a problem rooted in benefit levels that are simply too low. Homelessness therefore rises by design rather than accident. Its origins lie in the coalition’s austerity programme: instead of building social homes, which would have eased pressure on welfare, the government redefined who could qualify. The then chancellor George Osborne, it was said, resisted building houses that might create Labour voters.
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Keir Starmer has called on European leaders to urgently change human rights laws so that member states can take tougher action to protect their borders and see off the rise of the populist right across the continent. But Labour has been condemned by campaigners and MPs who argue the proposals could lead to countries abandoning the world’s most vulnerable people and will further demonise refugees.
Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s political editor and host of Politics Weekly UK, Pippa Crerar
Rachel Reeves has condemned leaks before her make-or-break budget as “unacceptable” as she revealed her income tax U-turn was agreed in partnership with Keir Starmer.
Defending her tax and spending plans before MPs on the Commons Treasury committee, the chancellor said she had been frustrated by “leaks that were clearly not authorised” before her November speech.
The chancellor will give evidence to the Commons Treasury committee about the budget from 10am
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, will start giving evidence to the Treasury committee at 10am. She will appear alongside James Bowler, permanent secretary at the Treasury, and Dharmesh Nayee, its director of strategy, planning and budget.
This is what the Treasury committee said in a news release about the topics it wants to cover.
Members are likely to examine the significant changes to the Treasury’s tax and spending plans, and potential implications for the economy, public services and government debt.
The chancellor is also expected to answer questions on topical issues, such as how her department handled the months leading up to the budget and the recently announced leak inquiry.
It’s our generation’s responsibility to break down barriers to opportunity for young people.
We’re investing in youth services so every child has the chance to thrive and we’re boosting apprenticeships so young people can see their talents take them as far as they can.
-Build or refurbish up to 250 youth facilities over the next four years, as well as providing equipment for activities to around 2,500 youth organisations, through a new £350m ‘Better Youth Spaces’ programme. It will provide safe and welcoming spaces, offering young people somewhere to go, something meaningful to do, and someone who cares about their wellbeing.
-Launch a network of 50 Young Futures Hubs by March 2029 as part of a local transformation programme of £70m, providing access to youth workers and other professionals, supporting their wellbeing and career development and preventing them from harm.
Exclusive: Culture secretary announces first national youth strategy in 15 years to help ‘vulnerable’ generation
Young people have faced “violent indifference” from the political establishment for decades, leaving them struggling to navigate a changing world, the culture secretary said as she announced the first national youth strategy in 15 years.
In an interview with the Guardian, Lisa Nandy said young people today were the most digitally connected but also the most isolated generation, adding that more could be done to police online spaces under new laws.
Public figures sign letter saying plan to reinterpret ECHR for asylum seekers is ‘affront to us all’ and a threat to security
The actors Michael Palin, Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley are among 21 well-known figures calling on Keir Starmer to drop plans to weaken human rights law and instead “take a principled stand” for torture victims, on the eve of a crucial European summit.
As David Lammy prepares to attend a Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg that will discuss legal changes to stop bogus asylum claims, the novelist Julian Barnes, the actor Adrian Lester and the comedian Aisling Bea have also signed a letter telling the prime minister: “Any attempt at undermining universal protections is an affront to us all and a threat to the security of each and every one of us.”
The PM is the face of failure, but he is not solely responsible. As the Blairite ideologues mass behind Wes Streeting, we should hold them to account too
There have been far too few defences of Keir Starmer in the British press of late. Time for a modest redress. As the last rites are muttered over his premiership, his colleagues want you to know that this is all his fault. The humiliation is complete: even Labour Together – the outfit that quietly plotted Starmer’s leadership bid – is now sharpening its knives. It is polling members on who should replace him, indulging the comforting fantasy that swapping captains will somehow stop the ship from sinking.
The Tory experience of regicide should offer a caution: do not depose a king unless you have already settled on a prince who understands why the kingdom is in crisis. The Tories toppled Boris Johnson and installed Liz Truss, whose zeal to slash taxes for the wealthy detonated the markets and sealed her party’s fate. Why? Because they convinced themselves that Johnson had failed for being insufficiently rightwing.
We want to hear from UK parents with experience in temporary accommodation about the impact on their lives, family and schooling
More than 172,000 children were living in temporary accommodation in England at the end of June, according to the latest quarterly official figures from October.
That represented an 8.2% rise on the same period last year. There are now more than 130,000 households households living in temporary accommodation in England, the figures showed.
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